


The Earth Laughs in Flowers

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, And Bucky needs a power source for his arm, Arc Reactor, Blankets, Flowers, Getting Together, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Prompt Fill, Protective Tony Stark, Solar Tech, Tony Stark Bingo 2019, Tony sells solar panel flowers, flower shop au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 04:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18275786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: After the apocalypse, Tony travels around making solar panel flowers so that people can have electricity again. He's happy to be helping, but he's lonely. He can't afford to stay too long in one place- everyone needs electricity, after all.Bucky Barnes escaped Hydra during the chaos of the end of the world, but his arm needs a new power source or it's eventually going to die on him. And it wouldn't hurt if he looked a little less like Hydra's assassin and a little more approachable.





	The Earth Laughs in Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo, Square A1: Partner Look

Tony was in the middle of unveiling the installation when he noticed him. A tall man with muscles like small watermelons and hair that fell like a sheer curtain over his face was watching him. It was kind of hard to see his expression through the hair, but when he caught a glimpse of it he was immediately reminded of a mountain lion watching a small creature that hadn’t wandered quite far enough away from its parents to safely attack, but was almost there. 

He went stone still, trying to assess the threat. Was this a run-of-the-mill apocalypse survivor fresh from the rural wastelands to the northeast? Was he an assassin, come to take out one of the new powers that had emerged in the post-apocalyptic world? Was he just one of those unlucky people with frightening default expressions who was innocently awaiting the reveal of Tony’s newest project?

He pretended to fiddle with the blooming petals of the solar panel rose clipped to his shirt while he watched the man out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t seem to be trying to get any closer than he already was, for whatever that was worth. He wasn’t acting aggressive towards any of the people around him. 

“Are you ready, Mr. Stark?” one of the aides asked. 

“Yeah, sure,” he said, giving the flower one last tweak for good measure. “Sooner this is over, the sooner we can get some more people hooked up with electricity.”

A small platform had been erected in front of the enormous tarp covering his installation. It was only a few steps high- nothing like the elaborate platforms he’d presented from back when he’d been CEO of Stark Industries, back before the apocalypse- but it was enough to get him high enough for the assembled crowd to see him. 

Voices rose like a sudden tide as he turned to face the crowd. He took a few seconds to let them whisper and chatter before raising his hands and gesturing for quiet. His eyes sought out the man with the prosthetic in the crowd as quiet slowly fell. He was still staring, eyes empty of anything but cold focus. A second later the noise level had fallen as low as it was going to, and he forced his gaze away. 

“Good morning, ladies and gents,” he started. “I know you’d rather get some electricity going around here rather than listen to me talk, so I’ll keep this short and sweet.”

He turned around and pulled down the veil that had covered his most recent installation.

The crowd burst into admiring whispers as the curtain fluttered off the arch of the crumbling overpass, revealing a bright, colorful garden. Wisteria hung thick and ethereal from the concrete, delicately masking the cracks and missing chunks that had marred the already ugly structure. The purple petals glowed slightly as they began to take in energy from the sun. Every once in a while they were interrupted by small circles of porcelain-white climbing hydrangea and clematis. 

“Each petal is a fully-functioning, highly-efficient solar panel,” he said, just as he’d said it years ago when he’d revealed his first prototype. Civilization hadn’t fallen yet, so his audience had mostly been people who wanted him to go back to making guns. His current audience was much more receptive. 

“They are not as delicate as real petals,” he continued. In efficient, rapid-fire motions he called the portable Iron Man gauntlet out of his watch and fired three whining blasts at the solar flowers. Not so much as a single petal came loose. 

The crowd’s appreciative murmuring grew louder. He turned to offer them his showman’s smile. It froze on his face when he caught sight of intense eyes shadowed by long, greasy hair suddenly much closer than he was at the start of the presentation.

The man’s hair wasn’t so much  _ long _ as it was  _ gone to seed, _ like it was a neat and orderly lawn that hadn’t been mowed in forever and had become a shin-high forest peppered with dandelions. The glint of the harsh winter sun on metal betrayed the presence of a prosthetic not entirely covered by his thick jacket. 

He turned back to his presentation before his surprise could show. 

“I reenforced the overpass while I was at it, so it shouldn’t collapse anytime soon. If you have reason to believe that it will collapse, there are maintenance holes drilled on the other side, under the patches of white flowers.”

He summoned the rest of the nanobot suit as he turned back to the solar flowers and rose up to the level of one of the bigger patches of clematis. With one gauntlet he stabilized himself so he could hover in place, and with the other he lifted a portion of the mat of vines. It lifted easily.

“They store energy pretty efficiently, so if you don’t end up using up all the electricity the day it’s produced, it’ll still be there tomorrow. Maintaining them is easy- if it doesn’t rain for a while, throw a couple bucketfuls of water on them to wash off any dust and pollen and whatnot that might have built up. It’s hard to see from where you are, but the vines are much thinner up here where the road used to be, so it should be easy to walk between them to bring water to the flowers on the sides.”

He returned to the platform and dismissed the suit. 

“If, for whatever reason, there isn’t enough sun to power the solar garden- maybe it rains for a long time, maybe the weather patterns go crazy again, who knows- then you can lift the hydrangeas in the same way as the clematis to get to a couple of mid-sized arc reactors. You will need multiple people to activate them, however, and they will only yield energy at certain stable, predetermined levels. This is a safety feature to prevent any unsavory characters from using the reactors as weapons.”

He smiled at the audience, though in his mind images of villages destroyed by arc reactors flashed through his mind. It hadn’t happened yet, but the fear that it would dogged him endlessly. Hopefully, after watching natural disasters and horrifying changes in weather patterns brought on by global warming, crop failures, too many simultaneous wars to keep track of who was on what side, and global-scale destruction, people would be wary enough of having to live without electrical power that they wouldn’t abuse the energy sources he gave them access to. 

“Now, are there any questions?”

Urgent voices swelled up from the crowd, and he began to pick out questions and answer them in as organized a manner as he could manage.

When he scanned the crowd for Metal Arm Guy, however, he was nowhere to be found.

* * *

The next day, he booted up his quinjet-turned-mobile-lab and continued south and eastward.

“Jarvis, let me know if anything important shows up in your scans today. Fly as slow as you need to get good data. We’re not exactly in a hurry here.”

“Of course, Sir. Do you have another destination in mind yet?”

Tony leaned against the cool glass window and looked down over the changed land. There were lakes where there hadn’t been any before, large ones that he knew covered whole towns. Areas that had once been green were now brown and dead-looking from up here, though if he were to touch down he knew he’d find various desert animals scurrying around. And also probably enough radiation to kill a man. 

On the monitor next to him, Jarvis added his scans to the ever-growing new map of the world. It was one of Tony’s side projects. As he traveled the continents trading and selling and sometimes just giving away his solar flowers, he ran scans and added to the map. When he had a complete picture of the globe, he’d know he brought clean energy everywhere he safely could.

Out of habit he glanced at the part of the map he used to call home. The sea lapped much further inland, eating away at the Eastern Seaboard like it was starving. It always surprised him to see that the familiar outline of the Atlantic Coast was just gone. New York was long underwater now, and Stark Tower with it. Sooner or later he’d have to admit that he lived in Malibu. 

At least he didn’t have to deal with private lobby groups trying to convince Congress to pass laws to discourage his proliferation of free, clean, accessible energy anymore. Since the apocalypse had come, he was welcomed everywhere with open arms. People wanted to have electricity again, and clean running water and heat and soil that wasn’t toxic, and his solar flowers could deliver that. 

Part of him always felt guilty about leaving. Surely there were people in that last town who would have loved the opportunity to get some personal flowers from him, or people from a few towns over would want time to get some. But at the same time, so many other places needed help. At least that community had the hanging garden now; most places still didn’t have even that. 

“Keep headed south, J. Tell me when we hit another serious population center. Minimum twenty thousand people.”

“Understood, Sir.”

“And remind me to check on the heather on the wings, I wanna make sure it’s still holding up under flight. Wouldn’t want this thing to lose power suddenly and send me tumbling to my death.”

“Of course, Sir.”

* * *

The town Jarvis took them down to was small and dusty. They were right around the US-Mexico border, though it was hard to tell these days. No one was patrolling it, and there certainly weren’t any checkpoints or people asking to see a passport.

Tony took a few hours to brush up on his Spanish a bit before leaving the quinjet and going to talk. Word of his solar flowers had spread pretty far, so it wasn’t like his appearance was completely out of the blue, but still. It would be better if there were no misunderstandings. Towns and small cities that had managed to pull through the end of the world were usually pretty okay, but every once in a while he’d stumble upon a town run by cults or previously neglected churches that had been warning of the end times for years before finally seeing their predictions come about. (Sort of. They were still  _ here,  _ after all. There had been no ascending to Heaven or anything.) 

He usually left those places pretty quick; just long enough to hand over some energy sources and make sure their water wasn’t contaminated. 

When he finally stepped out into the desert sun, the ground was well and truly baking underfoot. For a split second memories of wandering through a different dessert half a world away, arc reactor new in his chest and Yinsen’s blood drying under his fingernails, flashes before his eyes. Then it’s gone, replaced by a group of sand-covered houses and curious people gathering a short distance away from the quinjet. 

“¡Hola! Necesitan algo para la electricidad?”

* * *

As it happened, the town had a few solar panels from before the apocalypse. It wasn’t enough to power the entire town, not nearly enough, but the much more pressing issue was polluted soil. A woman named Ana showed him the temporary raised beds and hanging pot gardens they’d made with what clean soil they could find. They had gathered it from a spot several miles away, and transferring that soil took up a huge chunk of time. Since they grew most of their own food these days, they couldn’t afford not to have clean soil, no matter how much time it took out of their day.

Ana worried that the floods that had hit so many places to the north and to the east would come here as well and wash the contaminated soil into the local rivers. Having to retrieve all their farming soil was an enormous setback. Having to retrieve their water from miles away as well would make it even harder to grow enough food for everyone. 

And so Tony got to work. 

He’d run into the soil contamination problem before, so he already had most of the hard work done. But the manufacturing portion was a bit of an involved process, no matter now automatic certain parts of it had become. The safety features also took up a significant chunk of time. It was worth the inconvenience, though, to know that it would be that much harder for any potential villain to hijack his solar flowers and use them for nefarious purposes. 

For this project, he’d decided on sunflowers. 

The petals and leaves would be bright and happy-looking solar panels, while the root systems would do the heavy lifting on the decontamination. With a little tweaking, he could even make it so the petals could glow at night. At about three meters high, they could act as streetlights. 

The first hurdle he needed to overcome was what to do with the contaminants when they were removed from the soil. The obvious solution was to bind them to something else and make a more benign byproduct, but what to combine them with? Ideally the byproduct would be something useful, of course, maybe even something to put back into the soil. Changing the chemical makeup of the ground so quickly, beneficial though it might be in the long run, could still cause some shocks to the ecosystem, so it would be good if he could combat that immediately.

His thoughts whirled like a cyclone in his head, chasing each other in circles and drifting from problem to problem. There were always other things to consider, other design options to better optimize his flowers. Could he do something with the seeds? Store an edible byproduct of some sort inside? Store excess solar energy inside and make them into biodegradable personal batteries that people could harvest? No, that would require they have individual devices that could accept the seeds as a power source. But what if…?

_ Bang bang bang! _

A series of swift, heavy knocks on the workshop door startled Tony out of his engineering reverie. Cursing the interruption under his breath, he hopped to his feet, dropped his soldering iron and scrambled to catch it, then tripped over a couple of wires snaking underfoot to connect the various chargers sitting near his workbench to power sources embedded in the wall. He caught himself on his knees and forearms with a grunt. A brief flash of pain made him grit his teeth. Scraping a knee didn’t rate that high on his pain levels, but it wasn’t pleasant either. 

He quickly inspected his legs and arms. Both of his knees were fine- his jeans had protected them- but one of his elbows was scratched white and a few drops of blood were bubbling up from a difficult to reach spot on his elbow. 

The knocks came again, more insistent this time. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” 

He picked himself up off the workshop floor and set the soldering iron on the nearest tool storage shelf. A quick swipe of his fingers wiped away the blood, though more would probably come before long. Oh well. It wasn’t like people really prioritized appearances as much as they had before the apocalypse. 

He opened the door and stifled a yelp. 

Waiting for him on the other side was the man with the metal arm. Up close his eyes were somehow even more intense than they were at the unveiling, He looked like he was about to shoot Tony where he stood, then leave without a word. 

“Hello there,” he said. “What can I do for you? If you want the lights on in your house again, I’m your guy. If you’re here to assassinate me on behalf of parties unknown, please come back at a later date, I’m busy with clients right now.”

The man blinked. It made him look much less like a murderbot. 

“I am not to here to murder you.”

“Excellent, I’m all about not being murdered. So, whatcha got for me? Indoor lighting? Power source for charging batteries? Something that doesn’t need batteries? Soil and water decontaminators?”

The man thrust out his metal arm. Tony managed not to raise his own hand and pull out the portable gauntlet in his watch in response. 

“It dies sometimes,” the man said. “It’s long-term power source was- it was damaged. At first, it only died about once a week, but it’s been deteriorating. At this rate, it won’t be long before I can’t use it at all. But it would be complicated to take it off.” Tony thought he heard a small pause before the word ‘complicated.’

His eyes, which had been fixed firmly on some spot in the middle distance, suddenly focused on Tony’s face. 

“I heard that you were big on clean energy, before and after everything collapsed.”

His accent was strange; most of the time it was tinged pretty heavily with Brooklyn vowels, but sometimes something more Eastern European snuck in. 

“Well, it wasn’t like I was in the game for very long before everything went to hell, but whatever. So, if I understand this correctly, you want something to power those big, metal muscles of yours.”

The man nodded. It occurred to Tony for the first time that he was standing in the doorway like he was preparing to defend his home from invaders and the man was looming awkwardly on his doorstep, holding out his arm and staring straight ahead. He mentally shook off his unease and offered the man a thousand-watt smile. 

“Well come on in, can’t work on a piece of sexy, sexy tech like that without the proper tools, it would be sacrilege.” He swept out his arm in a comical gesture of welcome. When the man didn’t move to enter, he rolled his eyes and pretended like mere minutes ago he hadn’t been terrified that this man was going to break into his house and murder him. 

“What are you, a vampire? Is that why the Eastern European keeps trying to slip on in there? If you’re going to stage a dracula-style blood-drinking orgy, I think you’re gonna have to round up more people than just me. I’m fabulous, but by definition you’re going to need more than just the two of us.”

The man sighed deeply and carefully stepped through the doorway. 

“I’ve had enough blood for a while, thanks.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Oh? So you admit to drinking the blood of helpless young things!” he said in the phoniest of his fake-surprised voices. 

The man’s thin, tight lips twitched upwards. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you a good time first,” he said. This time it was Brooklyn all the way. 

“There’s the spirit!” he laughed and pulled the man around the corner towards his lab. “Now, since we’re on a roll here, can I get a name? It’s getting pretty awkward just calling you ‘the man,’ in my head.”

“Bucky Barnes,” the man replied. 

“Parents were really into Captain America, huh?” Tony replied. He lead Bucky over to the rolling chair by his workbench and gestured for him to sit down while he gathered his tools. “My dad was too. Kept going on various crazy expeditions to the Arctic because he was convinced he could find the plain old Captain Spangly went down in. Never managed to find him, but hey. I heard someone say the climate’s turned Earth into a scenic tour of the Book of Revelations, and I think that about sums it up, so who knows. Maybe the polar ice caps will melt a bit more before the disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation sends us barreling into another ice age and it’ll turn up.”

Bucky’s face contorted into a series of frowns, each unique and communicating some different shade of ‘this is uncomfortable.’ When he finally spoke, the words came slow and a little awkwardly paced, but clear. 

“I mean, you’re technically right. My mom always liked Stevie. Would have been a little difficult to name me after him, seeing as I’m older than him.” 

Tony’s head snapped up.

Bucky wilted a little under his incredulous gaze, but didn’t try and backtrack or smile to indicate he was joking.

“Do you mean to imply that you are the original Bucky Barnes, back from the dead?”

“More or less. I think I’d have preferred death to imprisonment and brainwashing, but from some philosophical perspectives they were probably about the same thing.”

Bucky averted his eyes as he muttered the last bit. His chest rose and fell faster, like an overheating dog. It was an impressively broad chest, almost impressive enough to distract Tony from the feat of engineering attached to his left shoulder. He mentally compared it to the pictures he’d seen of Bucky Barnes in his history textbooks. He could have sworn the original Barnes wasn’t quite so beefy. Then again, it had been awhile. Exercise regimens changed. 

“Hey J?” he asked. “How are you doing for power?”

“The solar hydrangeas are more than enough to keep me going for the rest of the month by themselves, Sir. There’s no need to worry about me.”

“Excellent. Can you run a facial scan of our guest here, see if it matches up with the original Bucky Barnes?”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Excellent, let me know when you’re done. So,” he said, turning his attention back to Bucky, “did you have anything specific in mind? Any designs you were hoping for?”

Bucky shook his head. 

“Just… can you make it look less threatening?”

The plates of the arm vented in a synchronized ripple, showing off the way the metal muscles literally bulged. The red light from the fluorescent tulips installed in the ceiling glinted dangerously off the dull metal. Sudden and awkward arousal slammed into Tony like a crashing wave.

“You mean less like some sort of intense grimdark cyborg hitman?” He forced the feeling down. Business transactions with mysterious maybe-assassins were not the time to be thinking with his dick.

“Yes.” Bucky smiled. “What you just said.”

“Alrighty then, that doesn’t restrict me too much, you have to work to make flowers look ominous. Any flower preferences at all? Something funky with weird petals? A color palette that matches your wardrobe?”

“Whatever you think’s best.”

* * *

Bucky sat stone still in his chair as Tony started working on his arm. He tried to joke around as he got the tools ready, but Bucky’s impression of rigor mortis didn’t let up even once.

“I’m not going to torture you or anything, you know. You can relax.” He collapsed into his rolling chair and pulled himself over to Bucky’s side with his heels. 

“Maintenance has always hurt in the past,” Bucky replied. His fingers opened and closed on the slightly elevated arm rest Tony had set up. The plates moved like blades of grass in the wind, all silent, synchronized rolling and then settling and then rolling again. It was enough to make Tony salivate. 

“Well, what if I took the arm off, and worked on it separately? Then you definitely wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“The arm can’t come off,” Bucky said. His voice was so cold the temperature of the lab seemed to plummet. “It is anchored to my bones and wired to the entirety of my upper back. Neural connections from my spine have been redirected to end in wires and metal rather than skin or tissue. Even when it dies, there is no way to get it off without ripping out something else. And I’d really prefer to keep my remaining body parts.”

His voice lightened as he spoke, until the room’s atmosphere had returned to normal. But Tony still felt cold. 

“Alright then, we’ll just have to do this the engineering way then. I’ll pop open these plates and turn off or disconnect anything connected to your brain.”

“Opening the plates is also painful. If the plates are opened-“ Bucky’s words seemed to slam into a brick wall. His throat worked like there were words he wanted to say, but he always silenced himself when he seemed on the verge of letting Tony in on the issue of the plates. He began to grow agitated, and the plates began to ripple so fast Tony could actually hear the whir of the servos. 

“Hey, Bucky, it’s all right.” He held his hands up and open. “We’ll just wait until your arm dies again, then do it while you can’t feel anything. In the meantime, we’ll figure out what sort of flowers to plant in between all these wires and gears.”

“I can’t make you wait around like that,” Bucky protested, but his voice didn’t have a single iota of conviction. 

“Sure you can. I don’t get the chance to make small talk as much as I used to, what with the entire New York social scene fleeing to doomsday bunkers and losing all their wealth and power to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. When I do get the chance, though, I find I enjoy it a lot more now than I did before everything fell apart. Catastrophic destruction really brings the community together, you know?”

Bucky stared at him blankly. “I’ve encountered three separate death cults in the past year, and I was wandering around what were supposed to be uninhabited wastes. I’ve been shot at by every make and model of every gun I’ve ever heard of. Philadelphia is nothing but gangs.”

_ “Was _ nothing but gangs,” Tony corrected. “It’s underwater now. Has been since last month. I popped over there recently, scanned it all myself. Or, well, Jarvis did. I doubt many people stuck around.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. It made him look younger, like a newly-recruited soldier instead of a terrifying assassin.

“My point stands.”

Tony waved his hands in dismissal. 

“Sure, there are some places like that. But most places, people are too busy trying to glue their lives back together to be shooting each other willy nilly. They had plenty of time to do that when the world was ending.”

“You’d be amazed how willing people are to keep shooting each other when by all rights they should have had enough,” Bucky laughed. It was getting harder and harder to remember how frightening his blank-stare murder-face had been. 

“You’ve just been hanging out in the wrong places. What have you been doing since the world ended, anyway? Actually, no, start before that. What have you been doing since the army lost track of you in Italy?”

“Murdering people,” Bucky said, and just like that his face was tense and ice-cold again. “I was captured by Hydra. They tortured and brainwashed me until they had a perfect pet assassin who couldn’t say no. I went into cryo between missions, and had a revolving door of handlers and support until a few years ago. The base they were keeping me in flooded, and the water shattered the glass of my cryo unit. I awoke in the water, without orders. The only Hydra agents I could find had already drowned, so I held my breath and swam out of the building. I can hold my breath for a long time.”

His eyes blazed like lightning against storm clouds. Murderous intent leaked from his every muscle. Then he suddenly slumped to one side. 

“Ugh. There it is,” he grunted. “Can’t feel it at all. Damn, it always feels so much heavier like this.”

Tony kicked off the ground, sending his rolling chair over to Bucky’s side so he could heft the arm onto the table. “Well, it’s a good thing this table is meant to hold something as heavy as a redwood tree. Or, well, a solar redwood tree. My versions are a little lighter than Mother Nature’s. And I usually do them in cross-sections anyway, since they’re too big to fit in here. But my point stands.”

He grabbed his screwdriver and one of his magnetic tools and started opening up the panels on the upper bicep. 

“So, Hydra, huh? Could have sworn we caught all those assholes when they tried to use all the resource wars and internal fighting as cover to stage a takeover. Joke was on them though, there was nothing left to take over. Just a bunch of angry people with guns who weren’t afraid to shoot their elected officials, regardless of how much responsibility they had for the whole  _ end of the world _ thing.”

“Serves them right.”

If anything, Bucky’s face got colder. His eyes were steely, like he was imagining the deaths of each Hydra member by name, in order of how much he hated them in particular.

“Right. So, flowers. Any ideas? Sunflowers could get a little big, but they’d do wonders to make you look less like a stone-faced stone-hearted killer, which is always a plus.”

Bucky hummed and looked at the seam of the arm, where Tony was opening the plates. 

“Those might be a little too big. I’ve still got to be able to move the arm joints.”

“Right, right. Um, wait a second, this is a tricky bit… okay, and I’m in. How about poppies?”

Tony popped the screwdriver into his mouth and started fiddling with the newly exposed wires. They were finicky things, all hair thin and none of them conveniently labeled or color coded.

He suddenly realized that Bucky had answered him and he hadn’t noticed. 

“On second thought, how about we figure out the flowers once I get this these wires figured out? Whichever engineer is responsible for all these wires should be stripped of the title immediately, they clearly didn’t make this piece of junk to take easy repairs and modifications. Seriously, what kind of idiot would bundle all the wires together like this? I’m amazed it only dies on you every once in a while, this is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Sounds good.” Bucky’s eyes were trained on the spot Tony had opened like there was a snake coiled up alongside the wires, ready to strike him. Yep, Tony was definitely going to be making some changes around here. Nobody should look at their own limbs that way. 

“All right then. We have a plan of attack. Now, how do you feel about letting me disconnect this thing?”

Bucky immediately glanced at the spot where flesh met arm. His shoulders hunched, and Tony could almost imagine the pull of muscle around metal cords. The arc reactor throbbed in sympathy. 

“I already told you, it doesn’t come off.”

“Not  _ all  _ of it, just the outside parts. It would be a lot simpler to add the solar flowers if I didn’t have to add them directly on to your body. And this way I can make a few tweaks to the base structure. There’s no reason for it to be this heavy, to start with. Just looking at your back makes my back hurt, and I can’t be that old yet Bucky! I need to be out here helping people out and being productive with my life, I can’t be getting old!”

The words were teasing, but in his mind Yinsen’s body flashed before his eyes. There were still so many places he needed to help. Gulmira had been one of the first places he’d brought his solar flowers, but there were so many other places that needed help, and still so much blood on his hands yet to be made up for. 

Bucky bit his lip. 

“How long would it have to be off?”

“Not long. Besides, if you need a hand with something, Dum-E can help you!”

At the sound of his name the robot rolled over from the back of the lab, where he’d been painstakingly sorting solar panel petals. A cascade of beeps flowed from his tiny speaker and his claw arm swayed side to side in his best attempt at a wave. He was getting better at it, but he still had trouble coordinating the motions correctly. 

“Dum-E, meet Bucky Barnes. He’s got a metal arm like you, though his is malfunctioning because it was made by lower engineers than myself. He might need your help while I fix his previous mechanics’ mistakes.”

Dum-E nodded seriously. Tony tried to stay straight faced, but the edges of his lips kept surging up. The bot was like a little puppy- so cute when he was serious. 

Bucky’s posture said  _ ready to either shake hands or fight this creature to the death at a moment’s notice, _ but his eyes just said  _ bewildered. _

“Is that a robot?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry, he’s friendly. He’s really into making smoothies. Gets super inventive, you know, comes up with all these combinations humans would never think of.  Like kiwi and motor oil, or raspberry and sunscreen. It’s a fun time.”

The tension bled out of Bucky’s muscles at Tony’s words. Really, the guy had a hair trigger. How many times had he tensed up and had to relax himself again since coming into the lab? Tony’s first lab to be christened post-Afghanistan and post-weapons was supposed to be a place of happiness and creation. Death had never been manufactured here, and the only things worth worrying over were the arc reactor-based high-powered energy sources he built for communal use energy sources like the hanging garden he’d presented the other day. Tony couldn’t have people panicking in this lab!

“Alright,” Bucky said tentatively, still eyeing Dum-E, “You can try and take the arm part of the arm out, but only while it’s dead like this.”

The memory of how painful the first maintenance he’d done on the arc reactor casing was flitted through Tony’s mind. 

“Wouldn’t dream of doing it otherwise,” he said with a full-body shiver. “I’ll just take it off, make it better in every way, and then put it right back on. You won’t even feel it.”

“Make it better in every way, huh? Sounds to me like you’re planning on redoing the whole thing,” Bucky said with a small smile. 

“Maybe I am.”

Bucky just rolled his eyes, like he should have known Tony would say that. It made Tony want to engineer him a thousand spare hands and make him sit right there on that chair where Tony could talk with him the whole time he was making them. It was the first time since Pepper and Rhodey saw him off on this energy-bringing trip of his that he’d felt that way. He’d only known Bucky for an afternoon, and he was already thinking up ways to make him stay. 

And why shouldn’t he stay? Tony had food, clean water, a home that hadn’t been destroyed, a mobile lab that was perfect for making last-minute aerial escapes, and enough resources to make Bucky new solar flowers every day for the rest of his life if he wanted them. If he’d been in Hydra’s hands for decades, then spend his post-apocalypse time wandering through the parts of the country that hadn’t pulled some sort of civilization together, then he must have had a rough time of it. Just talking with him had brought back more memories of Afghanistan than he’d faced in months. 

An overpowering urge to wrap Bucky in a blanket and hide him away from all the horrors the apocalypse had left in its wake welled up inside him. 

“Hey, Jarvis, do we have any flowers hooked up right now that aren’t red? Blasphemy, I know, but I’m starting to think I might be neglecting my duties as host. Got anything more relaxing?”

“Of course, Sir. You had some gold ones installed as well. You were very insistent on sticking to your preferred color scheme.”

The scarlet light from the red tulips faded away like blood dissipating in water. They briefly went dark, then filled up with yellow light instead. Bright, sunny daffodils bloomed in patches around the corners of the lab and in little splashes under desks and behind equipment. Golden marigolds lit up along the ceiling, and climbing yellow roses bloomed around the legs of his desk. 

Calm, cheerful golden light flooded the lab like sunshine. The whole space seemed brighter and less intense. Huh, maybe Jarvis had had a point about the red-heavy lighting. 

“Great, thanks J. Now go supervise Dum-E while he makes us a smoothie, it’s hot in here. Where are we anyway, Chihuahua? We can’t be in the desert without fruit smoothies!”

“Of course, Sir.”

“And where did I put the blankets? Not the ratty ones I use when Butterfingers over there drops motor oil all over themselves, the real ones. They’re still down here, aren’t they?”

“Check the closet by Dum-E’s charging station, Sir.”

“Hold on a sec,” Bucky said, “I’m fine, what’s with all this?”

Tony rummaged around in the closet until he found the Wall-E blanket Rhodey had bought for him when he first built the new mobile lab and started making his solar flowers.  _ It’s thematically appropriate, _ he’d said. It was fluffy and soft to the touch, and it was just the right weight to be comforting when wrapped around his shoulders. He’d used it a lot in the beginning, when he was still dealing with the mess that was post-Afghanistan and missed his friend but couldn’t bear to stop isolating himself. 

“Sorry Rip van Winkle, it just occurred to me that I haven’t been a very good host. You come up here and ask me for such a simple thing, and I bring you down to my red-lit bat cave and start bringing up nasty memories. I mean, the tulips are the default daytime energy sources down here and I kind of had to know a little bit more about the scary metal arm man before I let my guard down, but still.”

He wrapped the Wall-E blanket around Bucky’s shoulders. 

“It’s soft, isn’t it?”

Bucky ran his flesh hand slowly over Eve’s face like he was petting a skittish dog. 

“It is.” He sounded surprised. 

“So, flowers. Want to take some sample flowers and see how they look against your arm? I don’t have anything specifically for your arm, but I do have a few prototypes of flower batteries I made for a lady with a prosthetic leg a couple of months ago, those’ll be around the right size. I was thinking roses, they’re classy, and they’d go great with the-”

“Not roses, please,” Bucky interrupted. “Nothing red. Nothing that could ever be mistaken for blood.” His voice had gone so cold, Tony could almost imagine little blocks of ice falling out of his mouth in place of words. 

“Alrighty then, it’s a no on the roses,” he said after a handful of heartbeats of silence. 

“White roses would be fine, if you’re wedded to the idea.” Mollified, Bucky’s voice quickly lost its iciness. “Or yellow ones. Just not red.”

“Nope, I am not attached to the roses plan, we can do something else entirely. How do you feel about something blue?” He swiped a hand through the holoscreen projection of the plans for the roses he’d made as individual water purifiers several months ago and pulled up the plans for the blue delphinium air pollution purifier he’d made back when he was first figuring out how to add extra features alongside the basic solar panel petals and leaves.

Bucky held his arm up against the holoscreen and lined up the projected delphinium outline with his forearm. 

“Unless you’re planning on braiding those things through the plates or something, I don’t think it’ll be very… aerodynamic.”

“Hmm, good point, should have remembered that. The only other people I’ve made prosthetics for had lots of opinions, so I haven’t actually done the choosing part of this before. Okay, something on the smaller side, or at least not on a stalk or anything, and not red.”

He chewed his lip and scrolled through a list of flowers Jarvis had helpfully projected at top speed. Too big, to awkward, red, way too small, no one would even be able to see those properly, too gaudy, red, way too big, red again…

“Oh! How about crocuses? Those are small and sweet. No one’s going to see cute little spring-bringers popping up out of your arm like they’re pushing through the last of winter’s snow and think ‘dangerous assassin.’”

Bucky’s eyes widened when Tony holographically added a few sample crocuses to his arm. 

“Yes,” he said. “Those ones. Those ones are perfect.”

“Then let’s get started.”

* * *

It took a few weeks to make Bucky’s specialized solar crocuses, especially since he had to focus on the sunflowers and getting the soil decontaminated. Every day, Bucky helped him heave his half-finished installations outside for testing, helped entertain the kids that flocked to the quinjet to watch Tony work, and was generally an enormous teddy bear.

And every day Tony fell a little bit more in love with him.

* * *

Dum-E held Bucky’s flesh arm while Tony planted thirty-seven cute little crocuses in the metal one. Bucky smiled softly at the robot. It was possibly the most adorable thing Tony had ever seen in his life.

“Thanks for helping me out while your dad fixes me up, buddy,” Bucky said. “Let me know if you ever need someone to hold your hand, okay? Tony must give you loads of upgrades.”

Dum-E beeped happily and swiveled to show off the morning glories that snaked up his struts. They were some of the first solar flowers Tony had ever made. He’d offered to replace them with better, more powerful ones many times, but his stubborn little robot was intent on wearing them as long as possible. 

Bucky nodded carefully so as not to jostle his shoulder. 

“Very nice. The white really brings out the silver in your paint job.”

“Jarvis, please tell me you’re recording this,” Tony stage-whispered as he wired a light purple crocus into place a few inches above the elbow. “It’s like sugar but without the junk food.”

Bucky suddenly turned that sweet smile on  _ him. _

“Are you saying you want a little sugar, Tony?” 

All that arousal from their first meeting slammed right back into Tony’s stomach. 

“I’d love some,” he purred, “if you’re willing to stick around and give it to me.” He set down his tools and wrapped his arms around Bucky’s neck so that their chests were almost touching. If he leaned forward a little bit more, he’d be able to feel Bucky’s heartbeat against his rapidly warming skin. 

“Stay with me. You’re too sweet to be roaming around getting shot at. I teach you how to tend a solar garden, you can’t get an education like that everywhere.”

Bucky raised his head so his nose lightly touched Tony’s. 

“I’m sure. Those color-changing tulips of yours are pretty impressive.” He wrapped his flesh arm around Tony’s waist and pulled him down against his chest. It was warm and solid and  _ wonderful. _ “If I’m going to learn how to be a gardener, can I put out two lips together?”

“That’s so bad,” Tony laughed. “Do it.”

Kissing Bucky felt like stepping into the warmth of the sun. 


End file.
